Professional drivers such as truck drivers and bus drivers are responsible for operating large, heavy, and dangerous vehicles carrying valuable cargo and human lives. Additionally, they spend many hours and days driving and are susceptible to fatigue and distraction (outside or inside the vehicle) at any time. It only takes a few seconds of a lapse of attention to cause a tragic accident resulting in a loss of life. As a result, each year numerous automotive accidents and fatalities occur because of sleepy or fatigued individuals falling asleep while driving or distracted individuals failing to respond to changing road or traffic conditions.
It has been observed that these drivers exhibit certain physiological patterns (or driver behaviors) that are predictable and detectable. Examples of such physiological patterns or driver behaviors include head-bobs, frequency of mirror checks (the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, FMCSA, suggests that an alert driver should check mirrors every 5 to 8 seconds), looking at gauges, continuous forward gaze, hard braking, corrective steering behaviors (such as hard steering), looking down for extended periods of time, looking out the side windows for extended periods of time, failure to wear the seatbelt, sudden lane changes and/or drifting, and other similar patterns or behavior.
Systems which detect and warn of driver impairment are known, but many are limited in their effectiveness, in that they cannot reliably and consistently detect driver impairment, and thus may give false warnings when the driver is unimpaired, or worse, fail to give warnings when the driver is impaired. Furthermore, existing solutions merely check for certain driver physiological states such as fatigue based on one or two of the above driver behaviors or patterns. However, there is a need for estimating other driver physiological states such as alert driver, focused driver, distracted driver, drowsy driver, fatigued driver, etc. based on a comprehensive analysis of more types of driver behaviors, in order to not only reduce accidents, but also to promote compliance with laws and general good driving.
This document describes a new device, system and method that can monitor various physiological patterns or driver behaviors of a driver, calculates a physiological state of the driver, and provide suitable alerts to prevent accidents.